A Yakuza in Love

(Artsmagic, 11.15.2005)

A Yakuza in Love is a 1997 yakuza movie that tries to be different from others in the genre and achieves that goal while being quite uneven. Kinichi (Eiji Okuda) is an enforcer for an Osaka gang who visits Tokyo on a job and falls in love with Yoko (Yuna Natsua), an innocent young student/waitress. A clever man with the ladies, Kinichi drugs Yoko so that he can have sex with her and then kidnaps her.

The film starts out as a comedy only to lurch back and forth between offbeat moments and more lurid ones, many of these related to Kinichi's drug addiction. Back in Osaka, he is caught up in a conflict between rival gangs and goes into hiding. He wants to impress Yoko by showing he can change, so he stops being a killer and becomes a drug dealer instead. Yoko is drawn to his vulnerability, but Kinichi goes wild when he's on drugs, raping her and beating up his best friend (Shunsuke Matsuoka). He's some fella, that Kinichi.

The other gang is looking for him, but they are unable to find him even though he wanders around openly. Why? Because the film would end abruptly if they did. So it alternates between tender moments between the lovers and the hero's irrational behavior. Many things seem to happen for no obvious reason, as if something has been lost in translation (there are also many Japanese cultural references that will be lost on most Westerners.)

The point director Rokuro Mochizuki and screenwriter Yukio Yamanouchi, adapting his own novel, are making is that love, in the immortal words of Mickey and Sylvia, is strange. Crime? That's strange, too. The yakuza here are more incompetent than ruthless, chasing after an ambulance on bicycles.

A Yakuza in Love is the conclusion of what Mochizuki calls his no-good-middle-aged-yakuza trilogy. The first is the terrific, existential Another Lonely Hitman, also written by Yamanouchi. The second, The Fire Within, is not yet available on DVD in the US. In an extra on this disc, the director explains that he had come to find yakuza films boring and restricting and wanted to make something with unpredictable characters. He was also annoyed that Japanese women don't care for yakuza movies and wanted to do something romantic to appeal to them. There's nothing more romantic than characters who throw up blood and puke on each other, is there? At least we learn how to use chopsticks to help seal a packet of drugs.

Because Mochizuki is striving for the uncool, Okuda charges around like one of Toshiro Mifune's foolish samurai. He's engaging, despite the awkwardness of the material. Natsuo is also good, especially in a wild scene when she suddenly quotes the Amanda Plummer character from Pulp Fiction, an obvious influence on A Yakuza in Love.

In two other extras, yakuza movie expert Tom Mes places the film in the context of others in the genre and within Mochizuki's body of work. In all three extras, as with most extras, the camera never moves, making the comments seem more tedious than they need to be. How about a movement calling for the abolition of stationary cameras in DVD extras? -- Michael Adams